i think i made you up inside my head
by howlsatthemoon
Summary: This house is filled to the brim with ghosts, but you are the only monster. / AU. If Tate was alive and Violet was dead. Set in 2011. Three-shot.
1. I

Basically this is an AU. The roles are switched, Tate's alive and Violet's the ghost, and it's set in 2011. It's going to be a three shot with an ace soundtrack and everything. In the same way that music helps me get into the writing, I think it enhances the reading, too, or maybe I'm just crazy. The link to the complete playlist is on my profile, labeled "4".

**Soundtrack**: Counting Bodies Like Sheep to the Rhythm of the War Drums by A Perfect Circle / Like Suicide by Soundgarden / In Bloom by Nirvana / There's A Place In Hell For Me And My Friends by Morrissey.

**Warning**: Language, violent themes, lots of triggers about both self-harm and suicide, mild sexual content.

x

**i think i made you up inside my head**

**part I**

_safe from pain & truth & choice & other poison devils  
>see, they don't give a fuck about you, like i do<br>_—A Perfect Circle

x

The first time he enters the house is the moment that he knows he'll be here forever.

There's a pulse about the house. Sometimes where he strides, it's like he can almost hear the floorboards breathing and the walls whispering to him — lies or truth he can never tell. Even through everything, he's retained his naivety and it's the ugliest thing about him, he thinks.

Marcy, the realtor, explains the "recent occurrences" (read: grisly murders) that had happened to the previous owners and Tate stands over the very spot where they'd bled to death in the dimly-lit basement.

He can feel it in his veins.

Blood spilt.

Blood, what was pumping through him right now.

Keeping him alive. Forcing him to survive in a world made of piss.

Just thinking about the fact that he was touching the very place where somebody, _anybody_, had lay in their last moments, probably choking to death on the blood filling their throats and lungs, sticky and thick and creating a dark puddle on the floor that'll never quite wash out of the wood, makes a shiver run down his spine.

"We'll take it."

/

Sometimes, he'll be carrying boxes into the room he'd picked, and he'll feel a chill run right across the nape of his neck, where the bone sticks out. He'll spin around, dropping the box on the floor at his feet, but it'll be empty, hollow space. Nothing but him and his own twisted thoughts.

He blames it on the side effects of his antidepressants, but sometimes the feeling of his hair standing on end gets so strong that he truly believes there's something in the house with them. There's something more than what they see with the naked eye when Addy stops suddenly, and points, laughing at the unseen. It can't always be the maid who's fleeing around the corner, and there are breezes like breath across his forearms when every window is closed and he's trapped in his mind.

Tate tells Constance, once. It's a mistake. The woman is smoking a cigarette and painting murals across the walls — twisted things, like cannibals and monsters with faces only a mother could love. Tate likes them in some weird, affectionate way, but he'd never tell his mother. She wouldn't care. And he'd never take the risk of making her happy.

Constance slaps him across the face. It's not so much the force of her thin, long fingers, but rather the speed of her impulsive movements that makes him stumble to the floor. She's buzzed and he really should've just thought better of it, so he only flinches and scoots away, still sprawling.

"You've caused enough pain to this family for a lifetime, you selfish bastard," she spits, the white cancer stick gripped between her index and middle finger on one hand, a thin paintbrush in the other. "Can't you just let it alone for once, Tate?"

He stands up, brushes himself off. "All right, fine," he mutters. "Shit."

Constance throws her lit cigarette and it stings his face before he flings it off and it lands on the shiny wood floors, burning itself out within a matter of seconds.

"What the fuck, Mom!"

She stands and he cowers. He disgusts himself. "_Watch your language, _young man!" Constance screams at him. He's sure that Addy can hear it from up in her room. He prays that she doesn't come down. It'll only make it bad for her and worse for him. "Can you imagine? Running away from the scene of the crime like common criminals. It's all your fault. It's all your goddamn fault." She kicks his Chucks with a pointed shoe. "Get out of here. Just seeing you, seeing something that I'd given so much too, knowing it's my flesh and blood you're wearing — it makes me want to vomit."

/

He runs upstairs, kicking the banister and punching the walls, screaming at the world, hoping that the neighbors will hear. Hoping _anyone _will.

Addy opens her door, eyes wide and hair ruffled, wearing her pajamas. "Tate?" she whispers, terrified and sleepy. "What's happening?"

"Just go back to sleep, Addy," he snarls, and shrugs her off when she calls after him, her voice bouncing off the walls.

He ignores the open door to his room, where Kurt Cobain's voice fills the void, and instead heads straight into the old-fashioned florescent bathroom. He's so concentrated on getting his razorblades from where he's hidden them underneath the bath mat that he nearly runs over the girl standing in front of the mirror, blood dripping from a slice on her wrist.

_Wait._

"You're doing it wrong," he says immediately, closing the door behind him and turning the lock without another thought. "If you're trying to kill yourself, cut vertically. They can't stitch that up."

She looks at him. He expects her to smile but she doesn't; her eyebrow quirks and he follows her gaze up her arms where there are already two matching vertical slits, dark brown and red with scarring skin. "What are you doing here?" she asks, her voice flat and uncaring. He walks around her to where she's already laid out his razorblades on the sink top — all different shapes and sharpness, his prized collection.

He takes one of the blades in his hand. She ignores his movement. He balances it between his fingertips like a cigarette, but he's too distracted by the way her blood is bubbling out of the fresh cuts on her wrist. "If you're trying to kill yourself, you might also try locking the door," he retorts, just as coldly.

She rolls her eyes and rolls up her sleeves, not even bothering to stop the bleeding. The blood makes a dark, almost unnoticeable smear against her sweater. "You didn't answer my question."

"Shouldn't I be the one asking?" he counters without missing a beat. "Random girl in my bathroom. It's like a wet dream. Is this how they welcome everyone to L.A.? We should've moved here years ago."

She snorts. "Of course." She turns to the door, but he grabs her wrist — the one that's not covered in blood. He's not in the mood to test himself tonight, and he knows he couldn't handle that anyway.

"Of course what?" he asks, his voice low.

The girl looks at him with light hazel eyes. There's a darkness in them, a sort of film that she wasn't born with. Her eyes reflect her suffering. "You're just like everybody else. Full of shit. I shouldn't have expected anything more. How old are you, seventeen? You're zoned for Westfield High in this neighborhood. You'll probably fit in beautifully with the rest of them; shallow and close-minded. You'll blend right into this world." She spins on her heels again, but he grabs her. This time she slaps his hand off of her shoulder. He cringes.

"Wait. I'm not like everyone else," he pleads. "I — I'm Tate."

She rolls her eyes. "Bullshit. I'm surprised you haven't changed it to Kurt at the rate that you're going. Striped sweater? Ripped jeans? _Obviously _dyed blond hair that you probably haven't washed in a week. I can hear _In Bloom_ playing in your room from here. I guess no one's ever told you about subtlety." She smirks. It's a look that appears quite at home on her delicate face. "Keep it. It separates you from the others."

He watches her carefully, trying to keep a smile from twitching onto his lips. "What's your name?" The smile flutters into his expression gently, almost fittingly.

"Violet," she murmurs. "Like the — "

" — Hole song?" he finishes for her. She's struggling to hold back her own grin. He can tell he's impressed her and it makes him giddy with something he's never felt before.

She laughs. "There's hope for you yet." She turns and he watches her back as she opens the door and turns down the hallway, pausing for a second before regaining his bearings and chasing after her. But when he bends over the banister, looking for a glimpse of her downstairs, she's gone and the door's cracked open. When he shuts it and locks it, careful to tiptoe past the room where his mother's fallen asleep on the couch, a half-empty bottle of red wine next to her, and returns to the bathroom, the blood's washed down the sink cleanly, and there's only his blades scattered around the faucet to remind him that she wasn't just a figment of his psychotic imagination.

One of the blades is missing. It was his favorite. It was the one he used the first time he tried to kill himself, but he doesn't mind. He'll let her keep it.

/

He comes home from his first day of school with a black eye and a split lip. He'd thought that maybe when Addy had graduated high school, he wouldn't be stuck defending her all the time, but people who've only ever laid eyes on him still hate him. They hate what they don't understand.

When he gets to the lawn, two boys in matching striped shirts and bellbottoms are waving bats around Addy. Tate drops his backpack at the gate and sprints toward them, but they're already laughing and running away by the time he's halfway to her.

Addy's in tears. "Tate!" she cries. "I was having fun until you came along. You ruin _everything_."

As he enters the house, his mother takes one look at him and sneers in disgust. "It's a wonder you're still breathing, boy," she mutters, "what with the trouble you're always getting yourself into."

And when he finally gets up to his room, his bloody lip running down his chin and his muscles tight and sore, he can't even bring himself to protest when he finds Violet sitting cross-legged in the middle of his bed, scrolling through his iPod.

"You've got some promising taste," she says without looking up, "but you're missing some key things. I mean, you've only got Meat Is Murder on here and that's it. And I can't even find a single song by The Sex Pistols. You've got to expand, Tate. You can't listen to just Nirvana and Soundgarden forever." When he doesn't respond, she lifts her chin, her curtain of honey brown hair revealing her face. "Oh, my God. What happened?"

She stands up. He drops his bag at his feet, his books spilling out, but he doesn't move. He hangs his head, exhausted and rejected by the world. When she arrives at his side, quickly, like a spirit, she runs her hand across his bruised face. With her touch, he can breathe again. He reaches up and touches her elbow, and her fingers ghost along his defined jaw line. "First day at my new school," he sighs.

A held breath exits through her pursed lips. "Westfield, right?"

He nods brokenly. "The worst."

They spend the day lying on their stomachs, blasting through Tate's song selections. Tate doesn't do his homework, and neither of them care.

He downloads all of Morrissey's albums just for her; illegally, of course, but it's the thought that counts. They compare scars — her dark, beginning to heal, crusty ones, and his fresh, bright red, not-nearly-as-deep ones. They tell stories and trace each other's marks and he feels complete, slowly and surely, with her.

"Where do you live?" he asks her while she furiously searches up bands on his laptop, downloading songs for him to hear, one after the other.

She gives him a look between annoyance and nervousness. "Why? Trying to stalk me?"

The side of his mouth curves impishly. "Well, you do seem like a heavy sleeper…"

"Bullshit. I couldn't sleep through an earthquake on the other side of the planet." He laughs, loud and hard, for the first time since he didn't know when. The bed shakes with the sound. "I live — um — down the street. With my grandmother."

Tate nods. "My dad left when I was six, and my mom's been sucking random men off ever since. Like, honestly. Thanks, Dad, leave me with the biggest cocksucker on this whole planet. She's _such _a bitch, too. Especially to my brother and sister." He pauses, watching her suck on her bottom lip as she contemplates the whole thing, still staring at the computer screen. "Where're your parents?"

There's something in her eyes he can't decipher. "The truth?" she asks. He doesn't say anything, just bobs his head up and down slowly. "I don't care."

In the end he falls asleep with his head by her legs. She's still determinedly going through the couple thousand songs on the device. (He'd stolen it from someone back in Boston — swiped it right out of their hands and run, run, run, but he figured that's not something you tell someone the second day you meet them.)

When he wakes up, an hour later, groggy but with a smile evident on his face, Morrissey is echoing from his newly-filled iPod. The scent of Violet, light and feathery, is everywhere, and the bed is still rumpled where she'd sat as he'd snored next to her in peace. He looks at his palm, and there are Sharpie marker scribbles on it, smudged slightly. When he looks at it closely, he realizes they're letters.

_TAINT._

As he closes his fist and docks his iPod so that _There's A Place In Hell For Me And My Friends _fills the whole room, he thinks that things might not be as bad as they seem.

/

"So, Tate, these fantasies started…two years ago? Three years ago?"

"Two years ago."

The therapist his mother hires is handsome in a douche kind of way. He writes notes at random intervals and rubs his unshaven cheek often. He tries too hard to keep a straight face, and in turn Tate tries harder to freak him out.

"It's always the same — it starts the same way." Blood. Carnage. Piss. Vomit. Brains. Spilling out their ears. Drowning in their own blood and saliva.

"How? Tell me?"

He watches Dr. Harmon carefully, eager to measure just how far he can push him. That's the first thing he thinks of when he meets someone for the first time — not their eye color, or their clothing, but how far he can possibly push them until they're out of reach. "I prepare for the noble war."

How fast could he stop Ben Harmon's pulse? He could shoot him right between the eyes, watch his big medical degree brain explode out the back of his head. Slit his throat while he talks, so fast he won't even have time to react, watch the blood spurt out of his Adam's apple. Maybe strangle him to death in front of a mirror, arms paralyzing the grown man. He'd wear some sort of mask, and towards the end of the struggle, as the lack of oxygen makes Dr. Harmon's brain shuts down, he'd let his doctor pull the mask off and watch the look of horror as the poor man realizes his killer. That's the best part. When the victim acknowledges you — when he finds out that you're their savior, the one who plays the part of bringing them to the better place.

"I'm calm. I know the secret. I know what's coming and I know no one can stop me. Including myself."

"Do you target people who have been mean to you, or unkind?"

The darkness is raging in his mind, screaming filth and terrifying things. There's darkness in everyone, but it's when he let it in that he'd become so fucked. That's why babies are born with blue eyes. They're born pure, but the world taints them so damn quickly. "I kill people I like."

He likes Dr. Harmon. But not enough, not yet.

"Some of them beg for their life. I don't feel sad. I don't feel anything." Dr. Harmon looks up from his note-taking, and Tate has to bite the inside of his cheek to keep from smiling. _Gotcha_. "It's a filthy world we live in. It's a filthy goddamn helpless world. And honestly, I feel like I'm helping to take them away from the _shit_ and the _piss _and the _vomit _that run in the streets. I'm helping to take them somewhere clean, and kind."

There's something inside. Gnawing at him. Dr. Harmon looks closely at him, his mouth falling open slightly as his brain works to assess the patient. Tate knows how Dr. Harmon is going to die. Tate is going to kill him.

"There's something about all that blood, man." He thinks of popped blood vessels and opened wrists. He thinks of Violet, and her Morrissey and sarcasm and deep purple scars. "I drown in it. And the Indians believed that blood holds all the bad spirits. And once a month in ceremonies, they would cut themselves to let the spirits go free."

His voice gets low and raspy just thinking about it — blood and gore. It makes him thirsty.

"There's something…smart about that. Very smart. I like that." Tate looks up, and he sees himself a million times, bloody and dead and dripping all over the floor. He can't blame the others, really. He's just as filthy and tainted as the rest. "You think I'm crazy?" _I know I'm crazy_.

Dr. Harmon pause, mulling over his reply. "No. I think you're creative. And I think you have a lot of pain you're not dealing with."

Tate doesn't skip a beat in answering. "My mother's probably worried about me, right?"

"Of course she is."

He grins. He can't help himself. "She's a cocksucker. I mean, literally, a cocksucker," Tate explains, and then glances at the door to make sure she's not standing there, ready to throttle him. "She used to suck the guy next door off all the time. I'd be surprised that she wasn't fucking you if she wasn't paying you so damn much." He cocks his head. "I thought doctors didn't make house calls anymore. How much extra did you charge? Fifty? A hundred?" Tate fingers the hole in the knee of his jeans. "Or is my mom sucking you off, too?"

Dr. Harmon swallows. "Tate, I think we're getting off topic. Why don't we talk more about your visions?"

"You don't have to worry. My dad found out when I was six, and he left." Tate sighs. "He left me alone with a cocksucker. Can you imagine? How sick is that?"

"I've heard worse."

"Cool." Tate leans forward almost subconsciously. "Can you tell me some? I like stories." His favorite's _The Boy Who Cried Wolf_. He was taught when he was little that the moral of the story was that liars die a martyr.

Dr. Harmon smiles. "No, I can't."

Tate could kill him right then and there. Jump across the coffee table and beat the man's head against the floor until his skull has as much consistency as mashed potatoes. But he doesn't. He could've been a fucking saint in a past life. "The world is a filthy place. It's a filthy goddamn horror show." He's shaking, there's so much screaming within him then. "There's so much pain, you know?" And he'd gotten the bunt of it. He's been dying since the day he was born. We all have. "There's so much."


	2. II

I was definitely not expecting so much response, so I totally wanted to scream when I checked this afternoon and found so many people liking the story so far. Here's part two, part three is already finished and will be up tomorrow at the same time, around midnight. Happy holidays!

**Soundtrack**: Closer by Nine Inch Nails / The Sun by Mirah / Nude by Radiohead. 8tracks link is on my profile, labeled "4".

x

**i think i made you up inside my head  
><strong>

**part II  
><strong>

_i want to fuck you like an animal  
>i want to feel you from the inside<em>  
><em>- <em>Nine Inch Nails

x

Violet is there now, every day without fail. He's not sure how she gets in, but he comes home from school or runs upstairs and there she is, her eyes closed and head bobbing, listening to his music, cross-legged on his bed.

He wants to kiss her. Badly. He gets the urge, sometimes, to just reach out and touch her. Half the time she's so pale she's nearly translucent, like something's scared her half to death a long time ago. In all honestly the way her eyes sometimes drift off into a dreamy film and she gets so still that it's as though she's stopped breathing completely, he'd swear that she'd died.

Tate tells Dr. Harmon about her. He doesn't mean to. It just slips out day, like the way her tongue sometimes darts out, pink and hot and damp, circling her bottom lip before retreating teasingly. He wants to run his fingers through her hair, lay her down on the bed, caress her soft skin, make her purr like a kitten.

"She's a virgin," Tate tells Dr. Harmon cheekily, never calling her by name. The man keeps frowning, writing down notes, and it bothers Tate that he could pass off something as important as _Violet_, for the devil's sake. "They get wet _so _easily."

In all honesty Tate's got no clue about how to go about this sex-crazy thing. He'd kissed girls, back in Boston, of course, and had gotten to third base once or twice, provided with the right amount of drugs and willingness. But he didn't know what to do about the twisting of his stomach or the appearances of his grin. Where would he put them when he took off his clothes? Did she even think of him that way?

Of course she did. He could see it when she sighs with a huff and traces the lines on his wrists, hides away his razor blades under the floorboards, as if he had no idea. She wants to save him. It's almost cute.

He kisses her once. Just once. First her wrist, the angry, vertical scar on her left arm, slowly making his way up her shoulder until he can press his lips to her jawline. She makes a little mewl, and he'd taken her there and then, but she didn't love him. He wanted her to love him first.

Doing it gently, as not to scare her away, he kisses the corner of her mouth shyly, like Peter Pan and Wendy. She pulls him closer, presses against him, and it's all he can do to not let go of himself.

"Not yet," he whispers. She looks away, a blush creeping up the back of her neck. He holds her hand and kisses her again, the pull of the Smiths behind them.

Violet flips his arm over to see the underside of his wrist. She keeps running her fingers along the jagged cuts, looking the saddest she's ever been. "Those drugs that psychiatrist gave you must be wicked," she murmurs.

As he's falling asleep, it gets lost in his unconsciousness when he remembers that he'd never even told her he'd been seeing a shrink.

/

There's a boy at school who bullies him.

It's nothing he hasn't handled before. He gets dirt thrown at the back of his head, spit on his worn Chucks, knuckles in his cheekbones and knees to the gut. He fights back with all his might but it's still enough to fight the demon inside of him — awaken it until it roars at full force. Bloodthirsty. Practically lusting for it.

He lures the boy to the Murder House. He knows he shouldn't. He does, anyway. The house talks to him in his sleep, whispers dirty things into his eardrums until he wakes up feeling a tickle. He can't tell reality from his nightmares anymore, and the only thing keeping him grounded is Violet — Violet and her pretty purple scars, her baggy sweaters, her Morrissey, her kiss.

He didn't mean for any of this to happen.

Tate promises the boy drugs, and tells him that his dad, the dealer, operates from out of his office in the basement. The boy, naïve and longing for a high, goes down without even hesitating.

He runs out screaming two minutes later, his face clawed and bleeding, his clothes a mess of red.

There's something in the basement, and Tate knows this. He uses it to his advantage. What it is, he's not sure, but he's not sure of anything in the house anymore. There are people behind his back, and when he turns there's no one there. Addy laughs and makes friends with a few, but the ones that he knows are filled with a darkness that rivals him. They're out for blood. They're out for lives. He tries to tell Constance about them multiple times but she responds with the back of her hand and cruel, drunken accusations, so he keeps quiet and harnesses the pulsating evil for his own needs.

Violet appears behind him, watching the direction the boy had run from.

"Tate, what was that?" she cries, her face horrified. He steps toward her, but she steps away, wrapping her arms around her frame.

He reaches out to try to calm her, but she only swats him away. "That was that guy I was telling you about," he explains calmly. "He's not going to bother me anyway. It's okay."

She shakes her head, her eyes wide and angry. "_No_," she insists. "You can't let them get to you like that! You can't give in!"

"Violet, what are you talking about?" His voice is getting louder, not of his own accord. Why wasn't she happy for him? Why wasn't she laughing and praising him for figuring out the house that had so many people terrified? Her face, flushed and disgusted, imprints itself into his mind. "I didn't give in! I fought back! I scared that guy half to death. I bet he pissed his pants."

"You don't know the kind of things this house can do to you." Violet shudders. "I lived here, before, but we had to leave because it got to us so bad. You're already giving in. You want to hurt. Make other people hurt."

"I thought you weren't afraid of anything," Tate whispers hoarsely. Her voice is so full of hate, spite.

She shakes her head, backing away from him, wobbly. "I never want to see you again," she chokes out before running, taking off into the backyard until she vanishes.

"I THOUGHT YOU WEREN'T AFRAID OF ANYTHING!" he screams, and it doesn't satisfy the demon.

/

She comes back in the end of the beginning, though. She's the first to, in his life, ever.

He sees her again three days later waiting in his room, his hair still soaking wet from his long, hot shower, a towel wrapped around his hips. His arms are littered with painful red scratches to match her faded silver lines. Her face is shiny with tears, but her eyes are dark and filled with sureties.

"There's a darkness in this house," she breathes. She's several feet away, and when he blinks she's suddenly right in front of him, her teeth tugging at her bottom lip and the blood in his body rushing south.

Tate closes his eyes when she reaches out to tangle her fingers in the damp hair sticking to his neck. He could swear that sexy Nine Inch Nails song was playing somewhere in the background, but he's already so distracted by the smell and the feel and the sound of her that he saves the conspiracy for another day.

"We're _all _vulnerable to it," she whispers. "It takes you over — makes you think things you shouldn't, want things you shouldn't, _do _things you shouldn't. And the real fucked up thing is that it makes it so that you _want _the darkness, that you crave for it. And I'm selfish. Really fucking selfish. It wants you, Tate, and I don't want it to take you. But I'm only making it more painful for when you succumb. Everybody does."

She's so close, her tongue so near his that he can practically taste it through the air. "It's probably too late for that," he murmurs. He leans in to kiss her but she pulls away at the last minute, and he presses his lips to her neck instead. She melts into him, his arms wrapping around her waist, his towel starting to swing dangerously low. He adjusts it, hiding a chuckle, and she blushes, but rests her chin on his shoulder anyway, his face buried into her honey-colored hair.

"You could be such a good person, Tate," she whispers. The way she fits into him is all too perfect — it's all he wants, all he has. After everything that's happened to him — his siblings' conditions, his own damned sins, his mother's cruelty, his father's abandonment — she's the purest thing in a world of filth.

He doesn't know how, but suddenly he finds himself with his back pressed against the chilly wood of his closed door, her tongue pressing against his teeth in a way that rivaled the original sin itself. "God, no, fuck, no, Violet," he half-laughs, half-groans. He flips them around so that it's him pressing his weight into her so that her shoulder blades grind against the door, and she sighs into his mouth, her fingers wrapped around his throat in the most loving way possible.

They're spinning around, lips still pressed against each other, and she stumbles backwards until the iron footboard of his bed catches Violet right behind the knees and she falls over onto the bed, him following close behind. They're so close that he gets dizzy from the heat they bring. For the first time his head's empty of deranged voices and twisted slideshows of carnage. All that's there is peace and lust and his own goddamn desires, and he's willing to stay here with her, for always, if it means always being able to attain this state of mind.

His fingers keep desperately trying to keep the towel wrapped around his waist and still be able to grip her to him as tight as he can, while her hands are busy awakening nerves he didn't know were there and shedding her layers of tee shirt and sweaters and cardigans until she's left in a loose wife beater and her rust-colored tights. When she finally begins to tug at the top of his towel he pulls away, panting, his face flushed and his chest heaving, pressed against hers, both of them damp from his newly-showered body.

They pause, staring at each other, both unsure of what the other is going to do next. Finally, he rolls over so that he can lie on his back next to her, trying to get his heart rate under control.

After a long bout of awkward silence clouded by heavy breathing, Violet laughs. "Well, Jesus, Tate," she says, still out of breath. "I didn't think it was possible, but I think you've just given me blue balls."

They turn at the same time to look at each other, and when their eyes meet, both dark with the new sensuality of a particularly steamy teenage makeout session, neither can resist the onslaught of giggles.

"If you don't want me, you can just say so," she whispers when she stops laughing, her eyes wandering down to look at his lips, red and chapped and parted. "I can take it. I swear. I'm not the kind of girl who gets all whiny and insecure. I mean, I cut myself, but not because of that kind of shit. I can take it." They both look down at the same time, where his want for her is a lot more obvious. "Might not believe it, but I swear I can take it."

He looks up at the empty white ceiling, thinking about the endless sky behind it. "I want you, Vi. Anything else would be bullshit. God, I mean, you don't care about the crap that people spew and you see the world the way it really is and I like the way you smile and how your hair smells and it wouldn't even matter if you were ugly, though you aren't, because you're gorgeous. Plus your music taste isn't all that bad." She bites her lip, doubtful. "Honest. I want you more than…a dinner party with Kurt Cobain, or new Chucks, or the tombstones of those shitheads at school."

Her cheeks flush pink as she tries to resist the smirk that slowly appears. "You're so full of shit," she grumbles half-heartedly.

"Sometimes. Most of the time." He reaches down to where her hand lies and grabs it gently, so that his fingers slip into the empty spaces between hers. "But not now."

He squeezes her hand and after a beat she squeezes back. Neither of them look at each other. It's a way to reassure the other that they're still there, still listening. It's all they have.

/

When his mother hits him, he thinks about Violet. He thinks about the flowery prints on her dresses and the way her sweaters look like she'd stolen them from her dead grandfather's closet. He thinks about how she sounds when she talks music, smart and confident and open-minded. He thinks about how she feels when she kisses him, soft and vulnerable and light.

It keeps him from grabbing a steak knife and driving it into Constance's heart, staining the perfect mahogany floors. Let the wrinkled old maid clean it up, and maybe make him a cup of tea as he watches her scrub away the splattered guts of the woman he feels sick to call his mother. The thought of her and the promise that she'll be waiting, somewhere, for him — her voice luring him into the basement or her body sprawled across the sheets, listening to his music or reading his books or best, wanting and lusting and ready to kiss him until his thoughts have scattered into oblivion — keeps him from clenching his fist and embracing the urge to kill.

He tells Dr. Harmon about these thoughts. He tells him about the dreams, too, the ones that are so vivid it's as though he's living them out as a movie. He tells Dr. Harmon about how he dreams of a woman crying for her baby, petting his head and clutching him to her bosom as she weeps over her lost newborn. He dreams of girls rising from bathtubs, bloody and revengeful, and The Black Dahlia prancing around, asking when the doctor can take his next victim, _oh dear! _I do mean patient, sir! He dreams them as he sleepwalks, suddenly waking up in the basement or the attic, his mouth half-open as though in the middle of speech, or his arms clutched around something that isn't there anymore.

Sometimes the maid is there, watching over him with her cloudy grey eye and leading him back to bed with a disapproving look. He doesn't feel comforted unless it's one of those nights when Violet is waiting in his bed for him, keeping the covers warm. She looks at him with pity that he can't quite pinpoint, and she wraps her arm around his waist as they sleep, his back against his chest. She anchors him there so his spirit won't fly away, so that the so-called darkness she speaks of won't whisk him away.

He half believes her and half doesn't.

He wants to shove it to the side, label it as her trying to scare him. He lives in the Murder House, he knows, of course. He's always had a fascination with that macabre shit and had researched it one boring afternoon when he was busy not doing his homework, and the kids at school never fail to spit the useless fact at him when they can't come up with witty insults about his clothing or overall reject status.

But he can't just ignore the fact that he can _literally _feel something tugging at his soul — the darkness or the devil or whatever the fuck it is people believe these days. He can feel the house speaking to him, pulling him into the shadows, tricking him into getting what he wants.

He tells Dr. Harmon about it. He runs to his pretty little therapist and gets it all out so that it doesn't sit and fester in his chest when he spends those rare nights alone with his own thoughts and no Violet to keep him grounded. He wants to say his head's in the clouds without her presence, but he knows exactly where it is when she's not there nailing him to sanity. His head slips down six feet under the ground, into hell, where demons whisper straight into his ear making him do and think things that make him ashamed.

He likes blood. Craves it, even. The taste and the consistency and the color and just the very concept of it. It helps that every time he talks about it Dr. Harmon holds his breath. If the good doctor couldn't handle a few scary thoughts, then Tate's own sick version of desensitization was practically a civil service. He was just helping his therapist get better at his job.

The only thing he doesn't tell Dr. Harmon is about Addy. No matter what, she's still his older sister. Even with her down syndrome and the way his mother degrades her like half the time she's nothing more than a pet, she's smarter than any Langdon, and he respects that.

But he still wants to protect her. And he wants to kill the bastards who touch her.

His mother is a sick woman. She's tough and strong and she's got a Southern accent that can intimidate the most hardened biker, but there's no denying that she's just as fucked in the head as he is, and as much to blame for the way that he is as the devil himself. His mother dates a lot — has been since his real father had left when he was six and was never brought up again. The men she brings home tried to touch him once. A long time ago she'd cared and slapped them and called the authorities, but after a while even she didn't give a shit as long as they gave her a good fuck and left her drunk enough to not remember the fact that the timeline of her life was marked, not by success or even life changing events, but by funerals and murders.

By the time she'd stopped caring, he was old enough to fight back and Addy was old enough to embrace it. He wants to blame it on his mother but he can't help the nagging feeling that he hadn't been there to protect his sister. Maybe if his mother had finally let Addy see herself for the pretty girl she was, or maybe if she didn't bring home sick sadistic fucks…or maybe if he had fought for her instead of cowering from his mother's angry streak and instead found solace in his own solitude. His eldest sister had long left, fled from home before he was old enough to remember the way she looked. He had wanted to hate her but couldn't blame her for achieving what all the Langdons wanted. And now that Beauregard was gone — another one of Tate's sins — he was left to face the fact that his last remaining sibling was tainted by his cowardice.

It's the only thing that he doesn't reveal to Dr. Harmon. It keeps him up at night and the darkness knows it. The darkness soothes the thoughts and breeds them until he's consumed by them.

They make him sick. Sometimes he wakes up in the middle of the backyard, covered in dirt and blood that doesn't belong to him. There are animals missing in the neighborhood and the shovel's still covered in fresh mud and he knows somewhere in the back of his head that he's going to whatever alleged hell they can throw together for him.

His thoughts make him vomit, sometimes, they pound into his skull so hard. His temper has stretched so thin that sometimes he even yells at Addy, and has earned him plenty of bruises from his mother. He's so angry sometimes that he runs his razors across every patch of skin he can find — his wrists or the insides of his elbows, his thighs or even the bones sticking out of his ankles. Always deep enough to bleed a deep red, washing down the drain and staining his bathtub red for a few seconds, but never enough to die. He's not ready to let go of Violet yet.

It's cutting that's easy. It's the easiest escape there is to take the sharp end of a razor blade and drown away the mental with the physical. It's so much easier to deal with something that's tangible, something that's rational, than it is to accept the fact that you're completely batshit crazy.

But afterwards is hard. It's the hardest thing there is. To climb into the shower and wash away the coagulated blood and know that even while cleansing yourself, you're still dirty and soiled. The filth of the world has taken you over, inside and out. You've given up. Succumbed to them. To the darkness. At least with the razor you're numb — the sting of scalding water against opened skin is a whole new kind of eye-opening pain.

And when he catches glimpses of himself in the fogged-up mirror, he wants nothing more than to shatter the glass and slit his throat with the shards.

And when Violet crawls into bed with him after countless long nights, his skull screaming with the torture his own mind inflicts upon himself, it's all he can do to not kill her himself, if only to take her away from whatever gruesome fate a person like him could lead her to.


	3. III

Let me tell you, this shit really takes a toll on my sanity. I had to get up and pace around a bit to keep from forgetting to breathe and tearing my hair out. Tate's head is definitely filled with some dark shit. Anyway, here's the third, final, and by far, my favorite part. Happy holidays!

**Soundtrack**: Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want by The Smiths / Disarm by Smashing Pumpkins / Rev 22-20 by Puscifer / Mad World by Michael Andrews & Gary Jules / Violet by Hole.

x

**i think i made you up inside my head**

**part III**

_good times for a change / see  
>the luck i've had can make a good man turn bad<br>_- The Smiths

x

They go on their first real date on Halloween. It's not really a date, he supposes, by normal teenager standards. He skips school and she takes him to the corner shop and they buy a pair of disposable Kodak cameras, running around and smoking cigarettes and snapping haphazard photos of each other at cheesy L.A. landmarks. They try to sneak into Disneyland without tickets, past the ridiculous crowds of picture-perfect happy families, and get _so_ close to stepping inside until a worker catches them, yelling profanities after them, nobody really caring because on the outside they're still just silly teenagers in love.

He buys them cheap hot dogs from the street for a dollar, and they share a small basket of fries. He always feels so at peace around her — like somebody who doesn't have to take psychotics every morning and didn't have hands that always seemed to be bloodstained.

She drags him into a record store and they suggest bands and albums to each other. Most of the ones she shows him are outdated and obscure bands that he always seems to find himself loving, and he makes her listen to a lot of new material, even the most popular of which she's never heard of. She grumbles and complains when he takes out his wallet, but he buys the CDs anyway — if not for her, then for him. To listen to when she's not around, and to remind himself that she's made him a better person.

They end up at the beach by the time night falls. The waves ebb and flow and the fire cracks and his mind has never been so silent.

"I used to come here a lot," Violet notes. She places her head against his chest, close to where his heart beats. "When I was al — a little kid."

He stops and breathes it in — the smell of saltwater and smoke, and contrast of grainy sand against Violet's forgiving skin. "Do you ever feel like sometimes the world gets so small that it closes in and you can't breathe?" he asks. Violet's breath hitches in her throat next to him. "I love it here. We should come every day."

She laughs out loud. It's harsh and real. "Yeah," she sighs. "I wish."

He pulls her close and kisses her, long and hard, ready. He can feel it. He loves her — he's known it for a long time now. But suddenly he can see it in the way she looks at him and the way she confides in him.

She loves him, too.

Without warning, Violet pulls away from the kiss to glance over her shoulder.

"There's someone there," she hisses, "like a bunch of people." She scoots over to move away from him, still within his arm's grasp. They straighten their hair and compose themselves, ready to resume their activities when the other party passes them on their way to the beach, but instead they stop directly in front of the couple, blocking their view of the fire.

Tate's still looking at Violet when he feels their presence in front of them. "It's a big beach, you know," he begins to drawl, but suddenly he meets the eye of the leader of the group and a chill runs down his spine. It's the friend of the boy from before whom he'd scared in the basement. With reinforcements.

Violet doesn't back down from their silent glares. "Who are you guys supposed to be?" she sneers, eyeing the two girls' costumes — or lack thereof. "The slutty breakfast club?"

"Back off, bitch," the blonde one snarls. Her costume consists of nothing more than a black rhinestone-studded slip and plastic fangs. Some sort of vampire gothic chick. "You don't know who you're messing with."

With no hesitation, Violet stands up. "I'm not scared to find out," she tells them fearlessly.

"Violet, come on, no," Tate begs. He tugs at her forearm, looking up at the way the flames make her glow like some kind of ethereal being. "Not tonight." Swearing under her breath, Violet flops back down next to Tate, never taking her eyes off the other kids. "Come on, guys," he pleads with the others. "It's Halloween night. Don't be assholes. Don't wreck it."

The leader of the group steps in front of them — he's not wearing a costume, just his letterman jacket. "I got beef with you, Langdon," he explains. "You know Leo, right?" Tate nods slowly. "He got sent away. To a _mental institution_. Some shit place up in Canada."

Beside him, Violet turns to raise her eyebrows at him, but he ignores her. "That sucks," he says calmly. "Still don't know what this has to do with you crashing our little party over here."

"Aw, were you going to fuck tonight? Were you going to give yourself to him?" the blonde pipes up again, looking directly at Violet. "Cute, sweet little virgin."

Violet shoves herself away from Tate's tightening hold and steps closer to the other girl. "Too bad no one's been able to say the same about you since you were twelve," she growls. Quickly, Tate jumps up as the others follow the blonde girl towards her.

"Leo hadn't been the same since he tried to score drugs from you, shithead," the letterman jacket guy tells Tate, his arms crossing over his broad chest. "What'd you do to him in the Murder House, huh, Langdon? What'd you do? Rape him? Stick a fire poker up his ass or something? You're some kind of sick homo freak, aren't you?"

He grabs Violet's hand, but she only slaps him away. "Shut the fuck up," he spits at the boy, more concentrated on keeping Violet away from trouble.

The second he takes his eyes off of Violet she lunges at the girl, grabbing her long locks of blonde and tugging viciously. "Get her!" the blonde screeches, the sound making a few seagulls that had been lounging on the beach fly away squawking.

It all happens very fast. There are two boys grabbing Violet's forearms, dragging her away from the girl kicking and screaming. Tate, consumed by his rage, throws all of the weight in his shoulder into the brunette boy, shocking the other one into letting Violet go. She falls to the ground, crawling away on her elbows, the other two girls too busy comforting her over her lost strands of hair to care.

Tate holds the boy with one hand around his throat and the other gripping the collar of his shirt, choking him. "Don't you _ever _touch her again, or you won't know how to feel _anything_," he warns. His voice is steady.

The jock throws him off, making him fall backwards onto the sand several feet away from Violet, but he manages to throw a knee to his gut, making him stumble away, the breath knocked out of him. When the boy he'd threatened start to come near, Tate kicks sand into his face, blinding him. As he's focused on keeping those two away from him, the third boy tackles him maliciously, throwing in a few good punches. Sticky blood runs down Tate's face, and he can't help but laugh at the feeling of his nose being crushed, relishing the sensation of his neck snapping back to accommodate the blow.

His hand scrambles behind him. He's lucky. As the boy is smashing his knuckles into Tate's left eye socket, his hand closes around the rock. It's a good size.

He bashes it against the side of the boy's head so hard that he crumples to the ground behind him. For good measure, he slams it against the boy's ear again, and as he stands up, his ribs sore, kicks his side. The once perfect white sand is stained red. The other boys, still dazed, don't stand a chance as he roars toward them, crushing the rock against whatever expanse of skin he can find until they're all covered in each other's blood.

"Tate! Tate, stop!" Violet drags him away from the carnage, the two girls screaming at the sight of their cronies bleeding, one of them unconscious. When Violet pulls her hands away from his bicep, her pale fingers are covered with deep red blood. "Come on, let's get out of here."

They begin to walk down the street — Tate limps, and Violet supports a lot of his weight with her shoulder. She's left unbruised, only a spot of red on her forehead where the girls had clawed at her, but the bleeding has long stopped. They're silent, both of them, as they reach the gate to the Murder House, but before they can enter, Violet leans against the brick post to catch her breath.

"What was that, Tate?" she whispers, avoiding his eyes. "It was like you were possessed or something. You could've killed those guys, I bet, if I hadn't pulled you away."

The sharp pain digging into his abdomen keeps him from answering right away, and when he does, he has to speak in short, interrupted breaths. "Yeah, well, they touched you and it pissed me off," he mutters shyly. He leans against the post next to her, his chest pressed against her shoulder. "Don't forget that I'm practically your hero."

Violet's smile is visible even in the dim light of nothing but the streetlights and the new moon. "_Not_," she doubts. "I could've handled those bitches."

Tate laughs, nodding. "Yeah, you probably could've." She turns to face him. His hand comes up to stroke the curve of her jaw. His fingers leave a thinning trail of blood down her neck.

"Would you have killed them, for me?" Violet manages to ask. She's still out of breath, but not because of their long walk home. He presses his lips to hers gently and pulls away after a second, his forehead against hers.

The pain begins to dissipate as her nimble fingers find his shoulders, massaging gently. "Definitely." He kisses her more urgently, deeper and longer, pressing her against the brick as her hands explore the screaming muscles on his back. "I would never let anybody or anything hurt you. I'd axe a bitch in half for you."

Violet smirks into the kiss. Her brow furrows as they begin to move toward the backyard, still stealing kisses in-between their stroll, their hands tangled together. "Have you ever killed anyone before?" she chokes out, terrified of the answer.

He looks away. "It wasn't me — I didn't mean it. I swear." He bites his lip, and she kisses the place where he draws blood, licking it away. A groan escapes him at the sensation. "It's the darkness. It has me."

Her hands find his even in the dark. They're standing outside the door to the basement. "I have you," she murmurs into his skin, and he closes his eyes, letting himself go.

They fuck, there, in the cold, dank basement. They shed their clothes so that they're everywhere, bits and pieces — her tangled purple tights in this corner, his blue flannel shirt hanging from some clutter the previous owners had left. They take each other's virginity, and Tate wouldn't have had it any other way. It's like he's got a piece of her that belongs to him, like he's the devil himself — like she's sold that piece of her soul to him, only no one else will ever get the chance to buy it back.

He likes the feeling of the cold basement wall to contrast against the heat of their bodies. It's grounding. She takes him away to other places, other sensations that he's never even dreamed of feeling when he's jacking off like the perpetually horny teenage boy he is.

And when they're finished, and she throws his flannel shirt over her body, the hem barely coming past her ass, he thinks he'd marry her if it hadn't been way too much of a normal destiny. He knows how she doesn't like normal things.

They explore the house, stealing some chips from the pantry and sharing them as they wander around the Murder House, the feeling of ghost's gazes pricking their skin. Their end game is the attic, where Violet promises that she remembers leaving a chess board here somewhere when they'd moved out.

He yelps when he sees the gimp suit hanging from chains in the corner. "Holy shit," he says, practically fascinated. "What _is _this?"

"You know the gay couple that lived here before you? They were _really _kinky." She walks over to stand beside him in front of the rubber suit. "Like, deep into that S&M stuff. And in the end, it brought them to their doom!" She waves her hands around for dramatic effect. "They killed each other, something like that. One of them was cheating and they were role-playing and the other was pissed. I guess they were really good actors 'cause they ended up really killing each other. The details are fuzzy. The police didn't release them all to the public and I had to do some major detective work just to find that much out."

"They were kinky, huh?" Tate chuckles. He reaches out to feel the latex on his skin. He turns around to wink at Violet cheekily. "Are you?"

She tries to stop her blush, but it creeps up on her, turning her pink. She rolls her eyes, shoving him away when he wraps an arm around her waist. "Wouldn't _you_ like to find out," she mutters, but steps closer to kiss him again, her legs wrapping around his waist as they begin to shed what little clothes they'd pulled on after round one.

/

He can't stop looking at the gimp suit, though.

Maybe he's got some kind of repressed sexual fantasy, or maybe he just likes the idea of a mask over his face and the material clinging to his pale, sweaty skin as he fucks Violet — on a counter, against the wall, out on the gazebo that had apparently been there since Violet's family had lived there, he really doesn't care. It's not the thought of sex with her that makes him so thirsty for it, really, it's just the thought of their skin pressed so close, as close as two atoms can be. There's a theory that no two things ever really touch each other — that there's always going to be some kind of invisible force field repelling them that no eye can see — and Tate wants to prove that wrong, with Violet. It's funny to think that he's so addicted to her and she's never even mentioned her last name. She rarely talks about her past or family, and the most he can get out of it is that her parents don't give a shit about her and that she spends more time in this house with him than she does at wherever it is he lives. Whenever he presses her about, she spews some shit about not wanting the horribleness of wherever she resides to ruin the best thing she's got, and so he doesn't bring it up again, knowing the feeling.

Once, he calls her up to the attic with the bait of wanting to play a game of poker, and when she arrives he wraps his hand around her mouth. She kicks and screams but he's strong enough to back her up against the banister of the stairs until he can't resist and keels over in laughter.

She punches him in the shoulder. "You asshole!" she cries, her face still pale with shock.

"I scared you," Tate teases, pulling the mask off. His hair is damp with sweat from the rush of making her scream in a whole new way.

Violet glares at him. "You did _not_." She eyes him, up and down. Everywhere her gaze meets comes aflame. "God, don't tell me you've got some kind of sick fetish for that suit. I'm not going to fuck you in it."

He presses her harder against the banister, swooping in to kiss her, his lungs forgetting to work for the second when their lips are connected. "Fuck me out of it, then," he whispers hoarsely.

And as she helps him slide the rubber suit off of his quickly heating body, neither can deny that it fits him like he was made for it — like it was put in this very attic solely to corrupt him.

/

"Who wants to say grace tonight?" his mother asks politely, her pack of cigarettes at her side. It's practically a joke. It's always Addy who gives in and says the same prayer she's had memorized since she could talk, and it's only fitting. Addy is the purest of mind of all of them. She's the only one whose desires are unselfish.

Addy begins to say the prayer. Tate joins hands with her and only her, leaving his mother's left hand empty and limp against the off white tablecloth. He tunes out her words, as innocent as they may be. He won't fall for his mother's little act, and as much as both of the female Langdons wish it were, they would never be that perfect little Christian family.

But it's when Addy begins to rave about how happy she is here, how she's thankful for their healthy and loving family, that he cracks.

"Stop it, Addy!" he snaps, his hand slamming down on his plate. He underestimates his strength and the china shatters under pressure. "You're a smart girl, you _know _this family is the furthest thing from healthy and loving." He eyes his mother from underneath his shaggy bangs with nothing but malice in his gaze.

Addy frowns, startled by his outburst. Constance ignores him, only sighs and lights a cigarette, the smoke beginning to waft towards the still-steaming food. "Jesus H. Christ," she mutters.

"I hate this family," Tate mutters.

"Well, it's your actions that brought this family to this point, Tate!" Constance cries, exasperated. She tries to wave Addy away to send her upstairs, but she stays put, intent on watching the downward spiral of her mother and only living brother. "It's _your _fault — that we had to pack everything up and move here, that your sister and I had to leave our lives behind, that your brother Beauregard is no longer with us. Thank God that it means that he'll never suffer again, but Jesus, half the time I can't even look at you. God graced you with so many gifts and you don't even have the mind to use them."

Tate's vision blurs as tears form. "Beau only suffered because of _you_!" Tate bellows.

Constance fights back, her wit still as sharp as it had been when she was young and invincible and untouched by death. "And where is he _now_, Tate?" she screams. "He is dead, and _that_, my dear, is because of _you_!"

"Shut up!" Tate roars, his eyes clouded with red. "Shut up, shut up, _SHUT UP_!" He stands up, towering over his thin mother, but Constance snatches the carving knife from the platter holding the ham and he is so surprised by her actions that his foot catches the leg of the chair and he falls backwards onto the floor, his elbows catching the blow of the wood roughly.

His mother holds the knife up above her, and then, realizing her position, lets it clatter onto the table. Addy is silently sobbing into her hands, shaking in terror. "I'm going to slice this ham, now," Constance says calmly into her palm, pinching the bridge of her nose with her thumb and forefinger. "You can either compose yourself, sit here, and eat your dinner, or you can go upstairs, take your medicine, and go to sleep. You're probably just — tired. Heaven knows, we all are."

Tate tries desperately to meet Addy's eyes over the dinner table, but she won't look at him. He swallows dryly, staring as his mother and sister sit back down as if nothing had happened, beginning a conversation that ignores him deliberately.

Upstairs, the group of orange pill bottles on his bedside table catch him like a warning. He rolls each one over in his hand, reading the labels and warnings that he already has practically memorized.

He swallows one of the tranquilizers, but keeps the bottle clutched in his warm fist. As it begins to make him drowsy, he pours each one out onto his open palm, counting the pretty blue pills. There are thirty-two of them in that bottle, and he's determined to turn that number into zero.

"That's too many," Violet whispers, her breath tickling the back of his ear. As quickly as she arrives, she's in front of him, kneeling on his hands, touching him like he's a skittish kitten.

Tate lets a strangled sob escape his throat. "It's enough to kill me," he tells her, his voice low and raspy.

Violet smiles, her tears already running down her face. She reaches up to wipe them away determinedly with her oversized sleep. "Not tonight," she breathes, picking each and every pill individually and plopping them back into the bottle until his hand is empty.

She pulls him into the covers, tugging his clothes off until he's comfortably in nothing more than a t-shirt and boxers, then she tugs the duvet over them both until they're curled around each other.

"I won't let you die in this house," Violet mumbles into his collarbone. Her eyelashes flutter as she begins to fall asleep.

"Violet?"

"Yes?"

He takes a deep breath. The world begins to vignette around the edges, and he struggles to keep himself awake, but the tranquilizer is quickly taking effect. "I killed someone. I killed my brother."

Her breath noticeably stops for a second, but she doesn't say anything. He takes it as an opportunity to explain himself.

"I — I didn't mean to. I didn't kill him with my hands. I — I did a lot of shit, crazy shit, and I knew that I was going to go to jail for it. I set a man on fire, Vi. This guy my mom was fucking. I just — he pushed me over the edge and everything's black, all I remember is a bucket of gasoline and a match. And then my mom got this crazy idea to pin it on my brother. He's like Addy, not quite right in the head, and, well, he'd already had a history of being unstable, and they took him away from us. Beau didn't do too well with us, anyway, but he definitely did worse without us, and — and after a month of wherever it is that they took him — some asylum, some sick place for people that were way worse than him — he — he — he died." Suddenly his breathing becomes nothing more than deep, heaving sobs that take all of the oxygen away from the air surrounding him.

Violet pulls him closer, presses his face into the space above her breasts, and lets him cry. His tears soak them both to the skin but she lets him, anyway, whispering soothing words into his hair and crying with him.

"I'm a killer, Violet," he chokes. "How can you love me?"

She shakes her head and brings his chin up to look her in the eyes. "We're all killers, Tate," she exhales. He thinks of everything that a person murders on a day-to-day basis — a bug, a virus, a dream, a light. "We all are."

/

He finds himself in the basement, surveying the aftermath. There's blood covering the cold concrete floors, but the bodies have long repaired themselves, stood back up after suffering fatal injuries, because their hearts have already stopped beating.

But there are two bodies waiting for him upstairs.

He didn't mean to do it.

He swears.

_It was the voices._

/

He tries to remember, pushing his fingers into his temples, trying to break skin and crack his skull, let his brains spill out and then maybe he can frantically search for his memories within the grey matter, but he can't because —

_FUCK THEM KILL THEM RAPE THEM MURDER THEM STAB THEM SHOOT THEM HELTER FUCKING SKELTER_

— the voices are screaming louder than ever, and they're building some kind of invisible wall, blocking the memory of his actions from access.

He rocks back and forth in the corner of that basement, still in the suit, the mask long discarded into the mess of blood and guts. "Get out!" he howls into the shadows, pounding his brain with the heels of his palms. "Get out, get out of my head!"

/

_Where's Violet_? he wonders dizzily. He can feel her in the shadows but she won't look him in the eye.

His mind is starting to come back — it's the longest time that it's ever left him, but as it floats back in his own sick perversion, he's not sure if he wants it back. They say that the victims of torture sometimes create their own world in their imaginations to escape the pain that's inflicted upon them, but he's not sure if it applies the same way when the person inflicting it is themselves.

He starts to scream as the voices go away, leaving him with nothing but a buzzing silence and the images of the last few days returning to him, stained with red.

/

It starts when he puts the rubber suit back on — he's not sure where Violet is, but he's sure she's lurking around here somewhere, going through his CDs or hiding away his razors. It's late, around two in the morning on Friday night, and he strolls through the house casually, his eyes peeking through the holes in the mask.

He spots Violet standing in the office where his mother spends her time smoking and drowning in debt, but when she turns around he realizes it's an older woman, all curves and high cheekbones and the wavy hair past her full breasts. He backs away, confused, and then remembers that he's wearing the suit and most likely has the upper hand.

"There you are," the woman cries, as if it's nothing that she's the one who's broken into his house and yet, he's dressed as a robber. She takes a closer look at him. "Ben? Where the hell did you get that?"

He tries faintly to remember a Ben, but the only person he can think of is the fact that Dr. Harmon's first name is Benjamin. The woman approaches him confidently, sliding her shawl off her shoulders to reveal a sheer black nightgown.

"You really want to go for round two, huh?" she purrs, hips sashaying.

/

He wakes up the next morning in his room, confused and convinced that it had all been another one of those weird dreams, if not for the fact that the rubber suit was laying in the furthest corner of his room, covered in cum and blood. His bare body is sweating and naked.

"Tate!" his mother's shrill voice whistles from outside his door. In a panic, he scrambles to his closet, pulling on a random array of clothes. "Dr. Harmon is waiting in the office for your session."

He makes his way downstairs, trembling. When he feels the leather couch underneath his fingers, he has to pull away in shock. It feels exactly as it had in his dream — whatever it was.

This time, as Dr. Harmon asks his silly pointless questions and scribbles his notes down onto that infinite pad of paper, Tate can't answer, still shaken. It's not that he's withholding speech, something he's done for weeks at a time before, but because the darkness has taken over his throat, scaring him so terribly that he's lost the will to speak.

"You've got to talk if you want to get better, Tate," Dr. Harmon reminds him cockily. Tate eyes his jugular. The house is empty save for them and whatever darkness resides there; Constance had left for the corner market and Addy was at her own therapy session downtown.

Tate looks back down at the ground. Something catches his eye, peeking out from underneath one of the legs of the couch.

Dr. Harmon puts his notepad down onto the coffee table between them. "Your mother's really worried about you," he adds, like an afterthought. "She says that you've been skipping school a lot lately, and you've failed most of your classes." Tate glares at him, still wanting to focus on whatever it was beneath the couch. "She just wants you to get better, Tate. We all do."

"Bullshit." The walls of his throat have relaxed, but his voice is sore, as if his demons had used up his vocal chords without him knowing. "I don't accept that. My mother doesn't give two shits about me."

The therapist smiles and shakes his head. "If there's one thing I know, it's that parents can't just _not _care about their children." He leans back against his chair. "I have — _had _a daughter. Trust me, I know."

Tate frowns. "Had?"

Dr. Harmon coughs, his eyes cast downward. He looks closely at Tate, as if debating with himself about whether or not to tell him. "She died," he says finally in a regretful tone.

"Oh." Tate swallows, feeling guilty. "I'm sorry. What was her name?"

"Her name was Violet."

_There's a darkness in this house_.

He must not have heard that right.

"What was it?" Tate asks again politely.

Dr. Harmon looks as if it pains him just to say the name. "Violet. She was beautiful, had this gorgeous brown hair and these hazel eyes. She was so smart and she had such a bright future ahead of her — but she succumbed to…other things."

_We're _all _vulnerable to it._

It's as though all of the hairs on his body have stood up. He can feel so many people breathing on him, behind the shell of his ear and against the nape of his neck, but when he swivels around in a panic, there's no one there.

"Tate, are you okay?" Dr. Harmon asks, concerned.

Tate's fingers claw at his hair. "You're lying. You're lying, oh, God, you're lying," he barks at his doctor, standing up too quickly. His head spins.

_It wants you, Tate._

"Tate, you have to calm down," Dr. Harmon says calmly, standing up. He puts his hands out in a surrender.

He sticks his middle finger out at him, eyes wild. "Don't _talk _to me like I'm some kind of animal," he grits out between his teeth. There's too many voices speaking to him at once, commanding him, and Dr. Harmon's pleading, soothing words aren't helping.

_And I'm selfish. Really fucking selfish_.

They're circling the coffee table, the doctor still trying to maintain a safe distance away from Tate.

"You're wrong, Dr. Harmon," he tells him, managing to keep his voice from wavering.

The doctor's eyebrows narrow, and his forehead wrinkles. "What are you talking about?"

Tate bites his lip so hard then that it splits, flooding his mouth with the taste of copper, staining his perfect white teeth pink. "Violet still is beautiful."

_I have you_.

He lunges at Dr. Harmon across the coffee table so quickly that the doctor doesn't even have time to brace himself. He uses all of his dead weight against the older man so that they land sprawled on the floor. The doctor punches Tate in the jaw, but the weight of the boy's body on his ribs keep him from being able to regain his breath enough to fight back with all his power. Tate manages to get Dr. Harmon into a headlock, standing so that he's crouching over the man, sadistically restricting his oxygen intake with the crook of his elbow. For good measure, Tate bashes the doctor's head into the corner of the table several times until the man is dripping blood from both eye sockets. In the struggle, they move around and they find themselves in front of the mirror propped up against the wall.

Tate watches as the light leaves Violet's father's eyes. He knows what she was talking about now, about the darkness and the house and the danger. He knows.

He leaves Dr. Harmon's limp body crumpled on the floor. There's no heartbeat, no sign of life. Tate paces around the office, wondering what to do with the dead body of his therapist, wondering if he can still find the time to bury it in the backyard or if he'll have to drag it into the crawlspace before his mother can come home. The thing that had caught his eye underneath the couch comes back to mind and he bends over to snatch it from under the leg. When he sees it, he has to blink several times to make sure that this all wasn't just some sick dream.

It's the mask to the rubber suit.

Behind him, a hand grabs his shoulder and Tate spins on his heels wildly. It's Dr. Harmon, but that can't be — because he'd watched the man die just a second ago. He had put the back of his hand against his still-warm chest and felt no pulse. He had watched his eyes roll back into his head as his brain was starved of oxygen.

"Do you want to know my diagnosis, Tate?" the doctor asks calmly, but he doesn't wait for Tate to answer. "You're a psychopath. You're a sick fucking psychopath."

And when he blinks, the doctor's gone. But in the reflection in the mirror he sees Violet walk past the doorway to the office. When he turns around to call for her, she's gone, and he follows the direction where her fleeting body had gone.

"Violet?" he cries like a lost toddler looking for his mother. "Violet!"

As he makes his way down the hallway to the basement door, a woman appears, her eyes lined dark with kohl and filled with rage. "I MATTER!" she screams at him, her voice high-pitched. "I'm not just some toy that you can cast away when you're sick of me!" She grabs Tate and shoves him into the open basement. He catches his balance on the platform seconds before he falls down the stairs and inadvertently breaks his neck. At the bottom of the stairs, a man approaches Tate, wearing a doctor's uniform and gloves seeping with blood.

"I'm sorry," he says kindly, "but boyfriend aren't allowed to be present during the procedure."

Tate backs away, but his back connects with something broad and solid. He turns around and meets the eyes of a blond, muscular man, looking at him as though he's a piece of meat. "Do you want your cock sucked?" he breathes out huskily. "I don't care if you're a minor, we'll keep it our little secret."

Frightened, Tate pulls his arm back and cracks his knuckles against the side of the man's head, knocking him out. He kicks his teeth in for good measure. When he takes a step back, he crashes into something once more. "What's happening to me?" he bawls, a brunette man shoving him backwards. "Who are you people?"

"Don't you get it yet?" the brown-haired man asks irritably. The blond one grabs Tate's ankle, and he grabs the closest thing to him — a wrench lying on one of the dusty tables — and throws it against the blond's head with as much strength as he can muster, cracking his skull open. "This house is filled to the brim with ghosts."

Tate backs up so far that his waist hits one of the boxes. He looks down behind him, and the bold Sharpie letters make the tears spill over. _Violet's Things _is scrawled across the top of the box.

"But you're the only monster," the brunette finishes, and Tate whacks him across the head, too, killing him. He drags their bodies to the middle of the room, terrified and overwhelmed.

/

He surveys the aftermath. Blood. Carnage. Shit. Piss.

There's only one person who can make him regret it all.

/

As he makes his way up the stairs, there is a thin trail of drops of blood that aren't the result of his stained hands. Something's playing, echoing through the hallways, loud and mostly noise. His heart's pounding so loud it's as though he's got his ears pressed against his own chest, listening to the racing thumps. He doesn't want to find whatever it is that he's looking for.

"Violet," he shouts down the halls, desperate to find her. "Violet, I'm not fucking around, please!" Even he doesn't know what he's begging for, but the house does.

The house takes the things that you want and twists them around; it turns you and the girl you want to spend forever with into immortal zombies, or kills your parents so that you're left with the freedom you've always wanted, complete with the maid to bleach the bloodstains. It kills your husband so he can never leave you for his lover. It contorts your desires until they're so unrecognizable that you can almost convince yourself that this was really what you wanted in the first place.

He finds her in the bathtub. The pink bathwater has spilled over the edge, pooling in the linoleum tile. He doesn't mind. He sits next to her in the middle of all the blood and tears and water and holds her hand as she turns paler and dizzier with the loss of blood.

"Don't die on me," he whimpers. "Don't you die on me."

She's crying, both of her wrists slit open like a zipper. The dark brown scars have become new again, reopened for the millionth time, spilling open. She bleeds beautifully. "I didn't want to die, Tate," she explains, her voice coming out breathy and harsh. "I swear, after I met you, God, I wish I hadn't died."

He holds her hand tighter, pressing kisses as she bleeds out faster and faster. "I want to be with you forever. For always." The way he says it out loud is so decided and secure. Violet cries even harder.

She shakes her head violently. "I used to think you were like me, Tate. That you were attracted to the darkness." She pulls her hand away from his and strokes his cheek, the water droplets mixing with his tears. "Tate, don't become the darkness."

Slowly, her hand slides down his face until it's left lying limp against the side of the tub, swirls of red trailing down. He holds her as she dies again, sobbing into her damp neck. She dies loved for the first time in her afterlife.

He knows now what he has to do.

/

In the morning, he slides his guns out from his stash underneath his bed, and loads them quietly. He places them securely in the inside of his worn vintage trench coat — the only thing he has left from his father. It's only right for him to wear it on a day like this.

/

He'd slipped a sleeping pill into his mother's whiskey last night, and sure enough, when he peeks into the living room, she's still asleep. He slides his finger over the edge of the knife in his pocket. He wants nothing more than to take her by the hair and slit her throat, but he doesn't.

He _wants_ his mother to live.

It's a filthy world we live in. It's a filthy goddamn helpless world.

And he wants his mother to suffer. To live knowing that she'd outlived three of her four children, and the fourth resented her so much that she couldn't even stand to breathe the same air. He wants her to die alone.

/

Before he leaves, he writes it out on the chalkboard. The thing that he's been wanting to say. The thing that he'd never experienced until now.

He knows that she'll see it, and he knows that when she does, it'll all be too late.

It's all too late for him.

/

The only person he cries for that day is Addy. He takes her out back with the promise of an early morning walk, but instead he brings her to the empty park and slits her throat there, leaving her in the bushes.

He's taking her somewhere clean, and kind.

But he doesn't want her to be trapped in the Murder House. Because he knows that if she is, their mother would never leave. Their mother would cling to the remainder of their spirits with the illusion that she can go on living as if nothing had ever happened — as if they hadn't hated her more than they'd hated themselves, as if they were the most twisted and deranged of all the dysfunctional families.

He cries for Addy, but knows that in the end, he'd done her justice.

/

He arrives at school just as the first bell rings. It's the first time he's come to class in nearly a week.

_I prepare for the noble war. I'm calm. I know the secret. And I know that nobody can stop me. Including myself._

He puts his finger on the trigger and pushes through the doors.

/

Moira glares at him, sickened, as he walks past her back into the house after his rampage.

"What have you done to Madam Constance?" she cries, but he only walks past her.

Without even looking back, Tate reaches back and shoots her with the last bullet of his pistol. He doesn't look at the damage, but the bullet goes straight through her eyes, splattering her brains onto the perfect white walls behind him. He hopes it'll make a pretty portrait for the cops to look at as he jogs upstairs, calm, as if it's nothing but a normal day.

/

When he arrives in his room, she's lying on his bed, eyes ringed with red, flipping through a book about birds that was long overdue from the school library.

"Tate?" Violet murmurs, unaware of the bloodshed that had gone on. "What's going on?" He sits down, his back to her, shaking his head.

"Nothing, nothing," he assures her under his breath, just before the first cop rushes in.

And as he lies on the floor, choking on his own blood as the authorities try to catch the last words he'll never give, she appears to him, sobbing, but invisible to the SWAT team. She holds him as he dies, peppering his face with kisses and tears, and he's at peace for the last time in his life.

He appears behind her, watching his lifeless body. It's like an out-of-body experience — only it really is. "I like birds, too," he tells her, and she spins around, her face devastated.

She watches him cautiously, and then takes a step closer, as though afraid he'll disappear the moment they touch. "Why do you like them?" she whimpers.

"Because they can fly away when things get too crazy." Things are crazy, now and forever, but he'd never want to fly away from her. "I love you. There — I said it. And not just on some chalkboard."

He wraps an arm around her waist. Behind him, they load his bleeding body onto a gurney, his hand still clutched around air as though he was holding his empty gun. "Do you think, that, in another life, it would've ended this way?" Violet mumbles into his coat, unable to look at his corpse.

"I don't care. I would've waited — forever if I had to." He clutches her closer to him. "I'd die a million deaths for you." He wipes away her tears with the pad of his thumb. "Don't cry. Life's too short for so much sorrow."

Violet shakes her head. "You're wrong. It's an eternity. It's an eternity in a windowless cell."

/

The first time he entered the house, he'd known that he'd be there forever.

Even now, he still can't find it in him to wish it any other way.

/

_i should have loved a thunderbird instead;  
>at least when spring comes they roar back again<br>i shut my eyes and all the world drops dead  
>(i think i made you up inside my head)<br>_—Sylvia Plath

/

the end.


End file.
